Warbands in The War Within will give us Warbound until Equipped gear to share with your alts

At BlizzCon 2023 Ion Hazzikostas, the Game Director of World of Warcraft, took the opportunity of the World of Warcraft Deep Dive panel to talk about a lot of the systems coming to the next expansion, The War Within. One of those systems is the Warband system, which is essentially a rework of the game’s current systems to be friendlier to alts. This is how Warbound until Equipped gear comes into play — something that takes the concept of catch up gear via tokens that you can pass down to your alts and makes it baseline to the game. Now, you’ll just get loot that you can send to your alts instead of equipping yourself.

One of the things revealed by Ion is that the Warband comes with changes to how gear works in the game. While the system is designed so that playing a bunch of alts doesn’t penalize you, it also doesn’t reward you in ways that will make players feel forced to play a bunch of alts. If y’all remember Warlords of Draenor you know what I’m talking about — if you wanted to make money and progress your character you basically needed an army of alts to funnel gold to your main. That’s why Warbound until Equipped gear will exist — gear that drops for your character personally, a little weaker than regular Bind on Equip gear, so you don’t feel that you have to enlist a bunch of characters to get your main up to speed.

But for every time you’ve ever gotten a piece of loot on your Mage and wished you could send it to your Paladin, that’s what Warbound until Equipped gear is designed to do. It’s a means to make it so you’re time on your main doesn’t hurt your alts while not making your time on alts feel required to get your gear for your main. This system, in my opinion, should also be used to make it so that I can send my soulbound gear to my alts once my main doesn’t need it anymore, but for now, that’s just a fantasy for down the road. What we’re getting is still pretty cool. I’m looking forward to Warbands in The War Within.